Of all furniture needs, the chair may be the primary one. While most of the other forms (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to developed types including a bench or sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and an aesthetic item; it is also an indicator of social ranking. From the past royal courts there were plain signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to sit on a stool. From the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has developed a signifier of superior rank, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher floor.
As a furniture form, the chair holds a variety of various makes. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds have been adapted to suit to different human uses. For its unique importance with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when in employ. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be things inside or not, a chair is seen best and evaluated by a person using it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the different areas of the chair are given labels like the limbs of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious job of a chair is to support our human body, its worth is evaluated generally from how well it fulfills this practical role. In the creation of the chair, the chair maker is restricted in the static law and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair builder has large freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of cultures that created individual chair shapes, seen of the highest task in the industries of craft and art. Within those cultures, particular note must be made of ancient Egypt and Greece; China; Spain and The Netherlands in the 17th century; England in the 18th century; and France in the 18th century during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of masterful craft, are now seen from tomb discoveries. One of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs structured as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular structure was crafted. There was in our view no particular differentiation from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The real variation exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was designed as an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool this type stayed around for much later points in time. But the stool also then existed in the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were made out of wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, was then seen but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this kind is the folding stool, made from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient object still in form but as in a variety of pictorial material. The best known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those could be displayed. These unique legs were considered to be manufactured from bent wood and were in that case had to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore extremely solid and were overtly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek style; some casts of seated Romans display designs of a heavier and are a slightly less delicately built klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were revived during the Classicist period. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular brands of profound uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of drawings and artworks had been protected, with images of the interiors and outside of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing resemblance to representations of older chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two major chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair was found both with and without arms but always having its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one image, however, the stiles could be marginally curved on top of the arms so as to conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Together, the three sections were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the Chinese back splat then had an introduction for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that would merely to a particular capability reinforce corner joints (and then were loose to top it off) indicate a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and might have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs probably were allowed only for the senior people in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both of these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decoration issues are combined in a manner that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual items do not look to have been put together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same time, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this type of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of relatively thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive items may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised in many parts of the Continent, had no parallel in England. Prior to 1740, the most commonly used wood was walnut; thereafter, and for the rest of the century, it was mahogany. Walnut, though beautiful in hue, was soft and therefore less suited to wood carving than to rounded, curving forms. Outer surfaces, such as the back and seat frame, were usually veneered. During the walnut period, highly overstuffed armchairs, covered with leather or embroidered material, were also developed. The best upholstery of this period is precisely and firmly modelled and accentuated by braiding or tacks. When imports of mahogany became common, no specifically new chair designs appeared, but the character of the woodwork changed. Mahogany, having a firmer, closer grain, could be cut thinner, which meant that individual parts of the chair could be more slender in shape. Mahogany also lent itself better to carving than walnut. Carving was concentrated more on the arms and back than on the legs, which as a rule were straight and smooth with chamfered (bevelled) edges and molding. There was a wealth of variety in chairback designs, featuring elegant, pierced, vase-shaped splats or two upright posts connected by horizontal slats (ladderback).
Alongside the French Rococo chair and the best English chairs in walnut and mahogany, the stick-back chair was relatively unaffected by the stylistic changes of the day. Originally a medieval form, known, for example, from paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and still found in mid-20th century in the churches and inns of southern Europe, the stick-back chair (in all of its variations) consists basically of a solid, saddle-shaped seat into which the legs, back staves, and possibly the armrests are directly mortised. This typically peasant form underwent a renewal and a process of refinement in England and America during the 18th century. Under the name Windsor chair (a term that seems to have been used for the first time in 1731) or Philadelphia chair, it became popular and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
Within the Neoclassical period, no basic changes took place in chair forms, but legs became straight and dimensions lighter. Backs in the shape of classical vases replaced the fanciful outlines of the Rococo period. Around 1800, freely executed imitations of Greek and Roman chairs of the klismos type, with curved legs and backrest, appeared. French chairs of the Empire period, executed in dark mahogany and embellished with ornate bronze mounts, created a ponderous effect.
In cheaper versions of inferior workmanship, bourgeois chairs of the 19th century carried on the traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The only real innovations were the bentwood (wood that has been bent and shaped) chairs in beech that became popular all over the world and were still made in the 20th century. Around 1900 the continental Art Nouveau and Jugendstil styles (French and German styles characterized by organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric forms), and the Arts and Crafts movement in England (established by the English poet and decorator William Morris to reintroduce idealized standards of medieval craftsmanship), gave rise to original chair designs by Eugène Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland. These new furniture styles did not exercise wide, let alone decisive, influence. The Art Nouveau chairs designed by the French architect Hector Guimard, for example, are collector’s pieces, but his name is known to a broader public only because of his fanciful entrances to the Paris Métro.
Modern
After World War I, the Bauhaus school in Germany became a creative centre for revolutionary thinking, resulting, for example, in tubular steel chairs designed by the architects Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others. During World War II, the aircraft industry accelerated the development of laminated wood and molded plastic furniture. The dominant chair forms of this period go back to designs by Alvar Aalto, Bruno Mathsson, and Charles and Ray Eames. Rapid technical developments, in conjunction with an ever-increasing interest in human-factors engineering, or ergonomics, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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